Saga Recap: The Tale of Þorsteinn Housebaby

This story starts with a dude called Þorsteinn Housebig. He is so huge that he can barely fit through any door in Norway. Doorway, shnorway—he just shoves himself through anyway. His adventure begins when he manages to fit himself through a particularly unusual door: the one to the underworld itself.

Tablecloth trick

Apparently Finland is the gateway to hell, because that’s where he is sitting around like a lazy fuck when he sees a suspiciously bald boy. The boy asks his mother, who is hiding in nearby mound, for a stick to ride. (Not like that, you sicko. He’s a child! And possibly has cancer!). For some reason, Þorsteinn follows suit and the two both pretend to ride their sticks like witches on brooms. They “ride” into a river, which turns to smoke, and then they arrive in the underworld.

“The bald boy walks around, sneakily stealing food and bagging it up.”

They find themselves in some underworld palace at a feast and are apparently invisible to the guests, which includes an elf-earl of India. Whatever that means. The bald boy walks around, sneakily stealing food and bagging it up. Þorsteinn, on the other hand, decides he wants to steal the whole goddamn tablecloth, so he rips it off the table and makes a run for it. The diners chase the presumably floating tablecloth to the river, where the boy joins him with the magic stick and helps him to escape so that he may give the fancy tablecloth to the king of Norway. I’m sorry to report that this has fuckall to do with the rest of the story.

One bird, two stones

One day Þorsteinn sees a dwarf screaming his face off. When he asks what’s wrong, the dwarf says that a giant eagle has stolen his baby dingo-style. So Þorsteinn politely shoots the eagle to death, saving the dwarf-boy and getting the dwarf to shut his scream-hole. In gratitude, the dwarf rewards him with a stone that can turn him invisible, and a stone that can summon hailstorms, sunshine, and fire. These will obviously come in handy because he quickly finds himself blown off course into Giantland, which is probably just Estonia or something.

“Þorsteinn politely shoots the eagle, saving the dwarf-boy and getting the dwarf to shut his scream-hole.”

He bumps into three dudes who are so fucking enormous that they laugh in his tiny babyface when he tells them his called Þorsteinn Housebig. “More like Þorsteinn Housebaby!” the guy says, giving him a gold ring as a “naming gift” which makes the new nickname official. The main one says he is Goðmundur, the prince of this region, which is a dependency of Giantland. His two bros are called Fullstrong and Allstrong.

Goðmundur is on his way to be crowned king of his region by Geirröður, the evil king of Giantland, and Þorsteinn goes along too, remaining invisible to the giants.

Giants will be giants

When they arrive, they do all the kingly oathy shit. Then the king pits Fullstrong and Armstrong against Jökull and Frosti, the henchtrolls of the evil sorcerer Earl Agði. He demands his servants fetch his “goldball,” which is actually a 200-pound seal head so hot that that it shoots sparks and squirts boiling liquid fat. Taking the blurry line between CrossFit and gay fetish porn to a whole new level, he makes them toss this back and forth, strip down, and wrestle. Þorsteinn uses his power of invisibility to help his giant bros defeat the troll bros in their weird supernatural masculinity pissing contest.

“Þorsteinn hatches a stupidly detailed plan about this creepy-as-fuck drinking game that accomplishes nothing.”

The next challenge is a game in which they must drink from a giant drinking horn that has a prophetic old man face on the other end—quite possibly the last thing anyone should want to put their face on. It’s also filled with poison. Þorsteinn hatches a stupidly detailed plan about this creepy-as-fuck drinking game that accomplishes nothing because in the end he just waltzes into the hall, visible and comically tiny, saying, “Look what I can do!” He amazes the crowd by making it snow, and then melting the snow with sunshine. For Þorsteinn Housebaby’s final trick, he runs around shooting sparks into the eyes of all the giants and stabbing King Geirröður to death. Good plan, dumbfuck.

I guess it works because then they all ride into the sunset, Þorsteinn stopping briefly to convince Earl Agði’s daughter to elope with him to Norway. They get married there and return later to find that Goðmundur has become King of Giantland, giving them Agði’s old region to rule over. Agði returns several times as a zombie and hassles them until Þorsteinn goes to Agði’s burial mound and puts crosses all over it, which somehow puts him at peace.

Morals of the story:
1. The best zombie repellent is ironically the cross, the symbol of the world’s most powerful zombie: Jesus.
2. CrossFit is gay.

Read more Saga Recaps here.